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Sound inspires art for Kingston-born composer

SUPPLIED PHOTO
Contemporary dancer Bill Coleman performs to the sound art of Kingston-born composer Gordon Monahan in Dollhouse, which takes place Nov. 18 at The Isabel as part of this year's Tone Deaf experimental sound festival.

As a sound artist, sometimes sounds find Gordon Monahan rather than the other way around.

“Sometimes you stumble upon things,” explained the Kingston-born composer. “When you do sort of happen to stumble upon things, you have to have an open ear and an open mind to recognize that’s something I can work with and develop.”

Take, for example, one of the sounds he incorporates into Dollhouse, a contemporary dance piece taking place at The Isabel next Saturday as part of the 16th annual Tone Deaf festival. In the show, dancer Bill Coleman finds himself surrounded by objects that fall apart around him. Monahan produces a soundscape live onstage during the show.

Back to that sound, though. Monahan had gone to a thrift shop to buy pots and pans, which were to be tipped over during one of Dollhouse’s slapstick scenes. Among his purchases he discovered a stainless steel bowl. He placed it atop a hot plate and poured in water.

“When it starts heating up on a hot plate, it moves back and forth and creates a rhythmic, percussive effect,” Monahan said. “And then there are contact pickups attached to each steel bowl to a mixer and an amplifier.”

He was intrigued by the sound, so he investigated how it came to be. He discovered a dent in the bottom, which prevented it from sitting flat. So he bought a couple more bowls and he ladles water into them during the show as Coleman physically reacts to the sound.

Other sounds are on purpose, though. At one point, he attaches electrodes to Coleman’s shirtless torso and runs them into a laptop.

“So that’s not so much accidental as determined by knowing how the technology works and playing around with it and saying, ‘OK, we’re getting a signal here, what are we going to do with that signal and the software?’” he said.

He and tap dancer Coleman started working on Dollhouse — which has had runs at the National Arts Centre and the Edinburgh Fringe festival — a couple of years ago, Monahan said, and worked in spurts.

“In a lot of my sound installations, I build mechanical objects that create sound through kinetic movement, and he was familiar with those, so he thought maybe we can also try to incorporate some of those elements into it,” said Monahan, who was awarded a Governor General’s Award in visual and media arts back four years ago.

“[Dollhouse] started with a very general idea that Bill came up with, and then once we started working on it together, little things developed individually.”

Monahan first took interest in experimental sound when he was halfway through his music degree at Mount Allison University back in the 1970s. His professor openly disliked contemporary music, and only taught a couple of classes about it in order to satisfy the college curriculum.

“And then he went on to explain that there was this comedian who lived in New York City who called himself a composer and he composed silent music. It was John Cage. I thought, well, that sounds really interesting,” recalled Monahan, whose military father was stationed in Kingston when he was born and lived here less than a year.

Monahan headed to the university library and checked out some books on American music theorist Cage.

“I went from attending that class that morning to that night having read through one of Cage’s books and already conceiving of a sound installation I was going to create, which I immediately set about to do,” the trained pianist said. “I remember specifically that class triggering my interest.”

It was the intellectual and conceptual side of contemporary music that intrigued him, and continues to to this day.

“Cage was as much a musical conceptualist and philosopher as he was a composer,” Monahan suggested. “He brought all sorts of radical new ideas into how music can be composed and how it can be interpreted and how it can become part of everyday life sort of thing.”

Monahan has a string of accolades and installations since then. And sound art is much better known and accepted now than it was then.

“When I started out, you do a performance and you have maybe five or six people show up. You started calling it sound art, and people said, ‘What’s that?’” he said. “It was a very fringe activity and genre in the late ’70s early ’80s.”

The genre was particularly popular in Berlin, particularly after the Wall fell.

“I first noticed it was gaining a lot in popularity in the early to mid-’90s,” Monahan remembered. “At that time, I was living in Berlin, and Berlin was, in particular, a very active city in terms of experimental music and sound art. There were a lot of curators working there specifically in that genre, and there were a lot of artists congregating in that city because the larger number of artists.”

Canada, too, is at the forefront of experimental sound. In fact, it was here that the term soundscape began.

While he has other projects on the go, some of which are commissions, he and Coleman will continue to tour Dollhouse.

“Dollhouse is still, in some ways, the early stages,” he said.

The show will be touring around the world, with stops planned for Brazil, Australia and Lithuania, among others.